What made Vice do it?
Vice Ganda’s popularity has spawned a culture of ridicule, and not the kind of comedy we love to watch and hear.
His brand of comedy shows just how low we are willing to go with the cheap punch line that is meant to demean and embarrass.
He owes his success to us.
Is cruelty the norm in entertainment?
We laughed hard and cheered him on when he poked fun at a disability or magnified an imperfection.
His “victims” even laughed along, too scared (or confused) to show offense lest he or she be labeled pikon, a bad sport.
WHAT IT WAS ALL ABOUT: Vice Ganda slammed for rape joke
Vice Ganda has made cruelty the accepted norm of entertainment nowadays.
Fat jokes are common. Rape, perhaps less so, but certainly not off limits.
Firestorm
And, when the opportunity came to combine the two in his recent sold-out concert at the Smart Araneta Coliseum, Vice was in his element.
It proved to be combustible. But not in the way Vice meant it to be.
He didn’t count on the firestorm that raged in the wake of likening broadcast journalist Jessica Soho to a roast pig and then following up that insult with an even lower blow.
RELATED: What showbiz can learn from the Vice Ganda brouhaha
He did something not Leno, O’ Brien, Fallon, Letterman, Kimmel, Murphy, the entire “Saturday Night Live” cast and Comedy Central network or even Joan Rivers would ever think of doing—make a “rape joke.”
Referring to the multi-award journalist as a roast pig was cruel enough, but suggesting that she be gang-raped?
What was he thinking?
How could he think he could pull off that stunt?
READ: Vice Ganda publicly apologizes to Jessica Soho
Has success gone to his head? Or was tequila, Jim Beam and San Miguel the lethal combination that night?
There may be a lot of reasons why he did the unthinkable.
But it boils down to one thing: we all made him do it.
